What a week...

Rain showers :)

Walking to work today I found myself contemplating the events from the past week and realized how content and happy I feel in this foreign country amidst the chaos, the dirt and the unfamiliar. Its strange how quickly the armed soldiers on the back of trucks and standing in road side bushes, the barefoot children begging and the men wearing pink jumpsuits (indicating that they are prisoners  and perpetrators of the genocide) have blended in to day to day life and become a normal sight. So much has happened over the past week and I don’t really know where to start. Sitting in the back of a taxi last Wednesday with a malnutritioned teenage girl propped up between us I could feel the lump in my throat and tears welling in my eyes as I listened to Angel’s story.  We spotted Angel’s thin body laying motionless on the grass on the side of the road as we walked back to work following a meeting with an NGO. Hesitantly we pulled back the torn and dirty jumper which was covering her face and crowd of bystanders soon gathered around to watch. After what seemed like a lifetime an 18 year old named Brownie crouched down beside us and interpreted.  Angel was a 15 year old refugee who had come to Rwanda a year ago with her parents and three sisters, her parents had since died and she now lived with her sisters in an extremely poor village in Kigali. Three days ago she had been hit by a car and it had taken her two days of begging to get enough money to cover the local hospital charges. Patients rely on family to bring in food to them as it is not provided by hospital. No one had been to visit Angel and on her four hour walk home her injured and weak body could walk no further so she rested on the roadside where we found her. We pulled out the food, water and panadol we had in our bag. As I helped her lift the bottle of water to her lips Cait went to a nearby shop to buy her some food she could take home with her before we found a taxi to drive her there.  Holding her hand in the back of the taxi it dawned on me that this young girl was the same age as my youngest brother. I couldn’t help but think how different the circumstances and lives of these two teenagers growing up on opposite sides of the world are and how unfair and unjust poverty is.  The following day we went to visit an orphanage that some of the other volunteers we live with work at. It was heartbreaking to see the conditions that these children were living in. This particular orphanage is the home to fifty one children aged between 3 months to 18 years. The children are housed in two dirty brick buildings which are separated by a small split level mud courtyard. Dark musty hallways, with small bedrooms on either side, run from the central room of each ‘house’. There are two bunks with a thin mattress and single blanket are in each bedroom and the children all share a bed. Like most houses in Rwanda the orphanage has no electricity. I can only imagine how cold it would get in winter. The cooking is done out the front over a coal fire and drop toilets in wooden shacks are out the back. Children with shaved heads and in soiled and wet clothing played with rocks and bits of wire that had become their most prized possessions. Ella explained to us that the few toys that are bought into the orphanage are quickly destroyed as the children have never had toys before so have no concept of sharing or even how to play. The only toys I saw were two balls. Within seconds of walking through the gates children surrounded us, eager and desperate for attention and human touch.  I sat on the ground all morning holding, hugging, tickling and stroking the faces of these beautiful children with big dark eyes, my resolve to one day adopt a child strengthening. One of the reasons we decided to visit the orphanage on this day was to help the other volunteers carry back the 50 chickens (yes, live chickens) that they were going to buy for the orphanage for the newly built chicken coup which had been constructed by a recent volunteer. I was curious as to the logistics of how the five of us would each carry ten chickens. I had been watching the locals and the way to do it seemed to be to hold them upside down…would my hands be big enough? I could already picture myself accidently dropping one and then having to run down the dirt road holding my other nine while trying to catch the tenth. So we set off at lunch time, walking a short distance before catching a bus and then a moto. I was pretty sure that they wouldn’t be letting us back on the bus with fifty chickens so I guessed that our return journey would be on the back of a moto with our chickens. I had a slight panic as the moto ride in the morning was a rather bumpy one down the pot hold street and I had needed to hold on with both hands, so how was I going to balance on the motorbike with my daypack and ten chickens?? This was going to be a sight to see! While getting on my moto on the way to the chicken man there was a bit of hustling going on with some other moto drivers which resulted in my driver taking off when I was only half on and I ended up with a nasty and fairly large burn on the inside of my leg leaving a patch of skin raw and exposed and the rest blistered. Cait and I made the made the decision to head home as she wasn’t feeling too well and I needed to get water on my burn …of course there was no clean water where we were.  While I knew it was a serious burn I wasn’t overly worried as the pain subsided completely within thirty minutes and I was happy that I had been able clean it and that it was well dressed. Two nights later, at a house party hosted by the American Marines and at the Embassy, I mentioned my burn to ex-firefighter and medic who was now working for the embassy. He immediately expressed his concern that the burn may be third degree after I described the wound and the fact that I had no pain. It needed to be checked out.  I was wearing tight jeans and after trying to pull the leg of the jeans up for a good 5 minutes I realized that this was not going to work -  the jeans either needed to be cut or taken off. Since they were the only jeans I bought with me I wasn’t keen to have them cut, so I found myself in the bathroom with a cardigan wrapped around my waste, jeans at my feet with a stranger looking at my burn.  It turns out that I have three burns all in one, the raw part of the burn being third degree.  After redressing the burn and with instructions on how to care for it, the medic cheekily asked “so was that the first time you had been in an American Embassy bathroom with a guy and your jeans off?”. A little while later, and after my first ever game of beer pong, the head of security at the embassy made an announcement that there had been a grenade attack five minutes down the road and that three people had been killed and twenty-six injured seriously. While the attack didn’t seem to be targeted at Westerners it was scary to be so close to such unprovoked violence.  To add to the events of the past week is the fact that we have had no water at the house for now seven days. Exactly a week ago today our water supply mysteriously stopped. By day one I was already feeling incredibly dirty. Having spent the previous day at the orphanage and walked forty five minutes in the sun on dusty roads I was looking forward to the cold drizzle of water I have come to know as a shower but there was not even a drop. Wet wipes would have to do. Three days later I was getting desperate.  That evening we had one of the heaviest rain showers I even seen – this water was not going to be wasted so I threw on my bikini, grabbed my toilet bag and headed outside. The rain was so heavy I was able to wash, shampoo AND condition my hair. I have never really appreciated being clean until that moment. When the water will come back on is completely unknown, we do have a chocolate sweep stake running at home with bets as to when we will have water again. So the week has been eventful to say the least but there is something about this place and the people which makes up for all of it. And for those of you who are wondering about the chickens, it turns out that they were baby chickens and could be transported in two boxes.